I was looking for an easy way to upgrade an outdated version 2.6.9 of rsync on my OS X Lion MacBook. I'm not too good with UNIX to begin with and finding required dependencies etc on my OS X Lion would be a time consuming task. So I was looking around for any ready-to-use installers or binaries of the latest 3.0.8, when I stumbled upon this neat project called MacPorts. It provides an easy to use system for getting binaries for such open-source tools on the Mac OS X systems. Installation was simple - this is from the MacPorts website

- “dmg” disk images for Lion and Snow Leopard. These contain pkg installers for use with the Mac OS X Installer. This is the simplest installation procedure that most users should follow after meeting the requirements listed below. An installer forLeopard, as a legacy platform, is also available.

Before installing enable the root user and install Xcode from the AppStore (on Lion) or Apple dev connection website (Snow Leopard/Leopard). You would need X11 as well for ports that depend on it. Use the package installer and then simply run this to update to the latest of MacPorts

sudo port -v selfupdate

Now, if you know the program you want to install is supported by MacPorts, like rsync for example, all you do to install it is

sudo port install rsync